The most wildly productive year I’ve ever had started with me quitting. I stole a page from Brian Tracy and quit everything that wasn’t my day job or my volunteer gig. I did it so that I could see just exactly what I would put into the space that opened up for me.
Here’s what I packed into that year – making a lifelong dream come true, starting a new business, forty-five pounds of weight loss, a new position at work, a hike across Scotland and year of being coached by three awesome teachers. That was a pretty cool year. When I look back on that fabulous year of growth, the feeling that invariably hits me is a feeling of – space.
To start that year, I had to create space for change and when I did, the results were magical.
You can have a magical year too. You can.
It takes a certain type of work to do it, but you have it in you. The best part is? Just getting to the starting point of clear space feels so darn good, you might want to try it for the feeling of freedom and invigoration alone.
You in? Let’s get started.
When we want to make a major change at work, or in our personal lives, we need to create space for it. I highly advise trying the full-on quit everything tactic. If you don’t want to just chuck everything that isn’t nailed down – physically and/or metaphorically as I did, you’ll need to create pockets of space.
To start, clarify if you need to create space for a one-time achievement or a lifestyle change. Click these links to check my blog from last week and pick up your free worksheet here.
A single achievement – earning a degree, putting on an addition, completing a large project or hitting a target objective requires concrete blocks of space in your calendar and dedicated planning and reframing time. We’ll talk about reframing in a minute. What’s important here is the idea that this type of goal ends. You can go all-in on one thing and depending on the length of the project, you can even let some things in your life slide while you do it.
A workstyle or lifestyle change requires a more creative thought process. You’ll still need planning and reframing but you’ll also need to think about the space you create in terms of an on-going commitment and identity change. This is the type of change space that asks us to really rip open our current patterns and start restitching them into something new. It’s scary and it’s amazing.
If you try to cram in changes without creating space for them – be that space in your calendar or space in your mind to really work out how to do them, you’re probably going to wind up back in the old grind, snapping awake somewhere in August realizing another year has gone by and your opportunity for change one year older. Sigh.
I feel you, but one year older is one year wiser and you’re ready this time.
There are a few ways to create space for the changes you want to make. First, you can hit a few out of the park right away by completing that worksheet from last week. If you did it already, great. Head back to the section where you listed what you had to do more of and less of if you wanted to hit the lifestyle sweet spot. All those “do less of this…” statements probably share some common elements. Spend a few minutes refining them.
Things like – spend less time with email checking, unproductive meetings, and busy work are the low hanging fruit. We clear these things out and then we find them slipping back in again, like weeds or unwanted spam. So go through your sheet and make those changes the first thing on your list for clearing space.
Oh, how do you clear those weeds out? Identify, evaluate, replace, appreciate.
Notice the behavior. You might spend a day just making a hash mark or tapping your knuckles on your desk when you notice that you’ve been fiddling with emails for a half-hour instead of doing your main work.
When you notice the behavior, give yourself the gift of sixty seconds to evaluate it. How do you physically right now? Tight jaw, big frown? Slack mouth, drooling a bit? Once you’ve come to your senses – literally – then ask yourself, do you want to be doing this?
If this isn’t what you want to be doing, then replace it. Preferably with something you actually want – put on headphones, turn on your music and get to your project.
This is important – appreciate what you’ve done. Enjoy the idea that you are now doing what you actually want.
For me, I want to have more interaction with our customers, not to hear what they want from IT, but so that I can understand what their goals and objectives are, so I can start to suggest ways that IT can help. That’s a pretty tall order for me, but it’s the direction I need to move. To have the time and breadth of experience to do this successfully, I’m going to need more space on my calendar. This is also a workstyle change for me since I don’t intend to return to my current way of doing things. I’ll need more drastic clearing, so I’m going to use my three favorite space creators.
1 – delegate
Delegation is one way to get more space at work. On our team, we delegate down and sideways. When someone on the team has a special project, we work to delegate sideways so that we increase cross-training and create pockets of opportunity. Even if you’re not a manager, you can create a team ethos for this type of delegation by volunteering to be a delegee. Then, when opportunity strikes, you can delegate.
The key to being a better delegator is to understand how to pass off tasks fully packaged. We tend to unpack tasks and dictate the steps to complete in order to be sure the next person gets it all done just right. This takes way too long and helps nobody. Practice delegating the result you want. Let your teammate unpack the project and figure out how to get it done.
Another key component is to delegate meaningful work. If you’re asking a team member to unpack and figure out how to deliver a result, then they get to experience full contribution. That makes work meaningful. Make the work you turn over the type of work that gives them a chance to shine.
2 – quit
You heard me. JUST STOP DOING LESS VALUABLE STUFF.
Stop going to meetings where there’s no agenda. Stop decorating your office. Stop wandering around looking for coffee at 2 pm. Stop going to that monthly meeting for Office People In Favor of Plants. Sure, all the other attendees will be disappointed if you quit. Maybe. The fact is, you have no clue what they’ll think and frankly, it’s none of your business. Your business is the business of getting yourself to the life you want to live and the work that’s most important. They’ll be fine. Just. Quit.
3 – reframe
All of this is meaningless unless you can clear space in your mind. This is a repetitive chore and the basis for all the thought work coaching done by myself and my peers. I’ve seen a direct correlation between time spent on thought work and productivity in my life and that correlation is the reason I became a coach. I want to pass that on to you.
As you try to change, as you quit things, and stop doing stuff a ton of resistance and worries and doubts are going to come up in your brain. This. Is. Normal.
Thought work involves writing down your thoughts about whatever work is ahead of you today and then picking out some of your less than stellar thoughts. You then put them through a rigorous analysis until you can clearly see the patterns of behavior you need to enact to get your results. You can get a sense of this by going to my very first blog post – and watching the video on the coolest tool you’re for sure not using.
I put thought work under “clearing space” because it eliminates rumination, self-doubt and increases focus, all of which create more time for you to focus on doing what really matters.
And that? Is step two in the five steps to permanent change.
If you would like to work one on one with me for free and have me show you how to clean out space in your thoughts, book a free session here. I’d love to teach this tool to you.
See you next week for step three in the five steps to permanent change.